Need to be cautious and confront the cancer of false and negative domestic media propaganda

Tuesday, 11 February 2014

The primary image and impression of country to its citizenry and the international community is the perception portrayed by the various media organizations, domestic or international, online, print or otherwise. The media is a powerful tool for projecting an entities image to the rest of the world. Most unfortunately, most African countries, suffer from the adverse effects of deliberately orchestrated fictional and bad publicity.

Some of these negative media image is championed by external interests who serve the domestic interests of their places of origin and in other increasingly worrisome instances, local media have joined the bandwagon of propagating a most negative image of their countries with a view to foisting instability or to achieve other temporal political, ethnic or other sectional interests.As electioneering periods approach, the nature and incidences of such domestically generated negative media blitz seem to attain a new frenzy of their own, raising a semblance of instability in the hope of creating as much confusion as possible for perceived political opponent.The above scenario has attained new worrisome heights in Nigeria as it approaches the 2015 General Elections scheduled for 2015. The combined effects of negative publicity being disseminated by local media is stretching the polity to breaking point and pushing the country to the edge of a most dangerous precipice.It has become most necessary top call on relevant media outfits within and outside the Nigerian polity to exercise utmost caution in their reportage of political and ethno-religious issues in the country and to call upon the authorities of the Nigerian State and other African countries faced by similar plight of negative domestic media propaganda to utilize expert media services and other strategies to confront, challenge and cancel the combined negative effects of negative publicity.*********************************************Dr. Doyin Okupe is the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs; The Voice magazine will be having an exclusive interview with him on the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan and our questions will be from the perspective of the Diaspora.We shall be bringing you that exclusive interview in our subsequent edition.Watch out for it.

Enjoy your edition of The Voice magazine, the first release for the New Year 2014, it would be a great year and The Voice Achievers award for 2014 will be on 17th October 2014. It is going to be a great and interesting year so go along with us.